Design of a Distributed Control System Based on CORBA and JAVA for a New RIB facility at LNL

摘要

SPES (Study for the Production of Exotic Species) is a LNL project that willproduce by the end of this year the conceptual design of a specialized facilityfor Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) originated by fission fragments produced bysecondary neutrons; this facility will be characterized by moderate size,performance and cost and will allow to produce also intense neutron beams foractivities both in fundamental and applied Nuclear Physics [1]. In the contextof this design study and tightly related to medium size of this facility thearchitecture of a distributed control system using the Common Object RequestBroker Architecture (CORBA) [2] as middleware framework and JAVA [3] as mainprogramming language was investigated for the core sub-systems (diagnostics,optics, RF-control) of the primary accelerator. The performance of CORBA forthe high level control system was measured in different conditions and showedto be sufficient to cover the requirements for remote operations, because allfeedback loops will be performed either in specialized hardware or by dedicatedreal-time embedded controllers. A minimal programming effort, a good level ofmodularity and long-term maintenance were the reasons to choose JAVA and itsrelated application builders as the main programming language for the GraphicalUser Interface (GUI) and the middleware implementations of this project.